Well the IBM position sounds like it would be kind of an easy transition, that I would not be thrown into anything too tough right away. NOt that there aren't challenges there, but I would be able to ease into it a bit. Bug fix here, documentation there, slowly and steadily work up to more difficult problems. Which is fine by me. But ultimately it sounded like their main stack was windows and java. I'm sure they've got *nix boxes and python doing things, but the main stuff would be in java on windows.

Now this may be stupid, but to me, right now, I would rather learn more about linux and python than java and windows. In 3 - 5 years I would like to be a python wizard, not a java wizard. Is that short-sighted?

To some extent, yes, this is short sighted. Languages are all much of a muchness. A decade ago, Perl was the flavour of the month. All the hot new sites used it. Today the same niche is filled by Ruby, and Perl is something of a pariah amongst scripting languages (though still my first choice for anything that needs prototyping.) Whatever flavour of the month you happen to like today will inevitably describe the same arc. That's just the nature of the business.

The good news is that all these skills are transferable. Becoming a better Java programmer automatically makes you a better Python programmer, and vice versa.

What isn't transferable is domain knowledge. If you want to make something of yourself in this industry, you need to specialise in something. Learn everything there is to know about something, be it networking, writing compilers/virtual machines, security or operating system design, etc. If you don't, you're essentially doomed to a career of moving bytes from a to b, applying some trivial transform to them on the way. Which, incidentally, describes neatly the vast majority of web development.

that's a very good point (about domain knowledge), but it doesn't seem to be that IBM will give him the sort of domain knowledge he's looking for either. and perhaps the original poster doesn't know what domain knowledge to look for - as he hasn't been exposed to it yet.

that's not short sighted at all - if you want to code python on linux, then position yourself that way. however, i am just wondering if you saw that they ran windows on their desktops and extrapolated that it means they don't do linux. i'd certainly ask if there would be a chance -- perhaps even right away -- to do linux/python there.

No, I asked. I told them my experience was mainly with Linux and C++, and asked what sort of environment I would be working in for them, and they said most of the projects are on windows and use java. :(

the linux company it should be. if the IBM field office you're dealing with isn't even waving the carrot of "but you'll be able to work on linux/python later" in front of you, don't bother.